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Stephen King and Noel Carroll on Why We Like Horror Stories

So I know I’m late in the game, but I just saw the movie, ‘It’ on Sunday. To be fair, I saw about two-thirds of it. The remaining third, my hands or my hair or my sweater were at least partially covering my eyes. In general, I’m not good with horror movies. I don’t have the stomach – or the nerves for them. As far as horror movies go, I liked the new ‘It.’ And it got me thinking, what is it about this movie and horror movies in general that appeal to us? They can kind of be a stressful experience. Parts of some horror movies can even make for an unpleasant experience.

I came across a book a few months past called Stephen King and Philosophy by Jacob M. Held. In its introduction, Held (with the help of philosopher Noel Carroll as well as Stephen King himself) presents a theory or two,

From Stephen King and Philosophy

Noel Carroll notes that “the attraction of supernatural horror is that it provokes a sense of awe which confirms a deep-seated human conviction about the world, viz., that it contains vast unknown forces.”…Carroll calls this attraction a paradox of the heart insofar as we are attracted to that which horrifies us. We are attracted to wonder, the sublime, the awesome, something before which we tremble in the recognition that we may be destroyed by or lost in it. It is terrifying in that it inspires terror, as do the deepest and most profound mysteries of the universe, for they rightfully put us in our place as insignificant, cosmically speaking.

Stephen King refers to horror as a “dance of dreams.” Horror, he claims, awakens the child in us and, he notes, children are bent. Children think around corners. Horror invigorates our imagination, requiring us to think around the corners of life. In this way horror helps us to reenvision what matters most. King notes, “If the horror story is our rehearsal for death, then its strict moralities make it also a reaffirmation of life and good will and simple imagination. Horror is conservative, and some things matter enough that they ought to be conserved. Horror challenges our norms, pushes them to the limits, and often times breaks them to smithereens, only to have them come back restructured, reconfigured, and reinforced. “So the norm emerges stronger than before; it has been, so to say, tested; its superiority to the abnormal vindicated.”